Menu

The Pause Returns – Bigger, Better and with a New Partner

It’s back. The Pause has returned – at least it has in the satellite data over land. Sea surface temperatures are currently cooling quite rapidly and we can expect the global surface temperature Pause, or Hiatus, to re-establish itself some time in 2017. Which is not good news for climate change alarmists, especially coming on top of all the other bad news emanating from the political sphere. The latest talk is that arch climate denier Trump will starve NASA’s environmental science division of funding and plow the money into space exploration instead. Terrible. Gavin will not be happy.

What is interesting (to me at least, putting aside the politics for a change) is that decent science is now emerging to expand upon the current long list of excuses for the Pause, or Hiatus, or slowdown – which have mainly tended to focus on heat being swallowed up by the deep oceans or the influence of natural decadal climate variability. Of course, there have also been several ‘scientific’ attempts to erase the Pause completely using statistical arguments and/or ‘adjusted’ data. But it’s a stubborn bugger, this Pause, and its return is likely to cause considerable consternation in ze warmist bunker.

So, rather than ‘excuses’ which suggest a temporary slowdown in surface warming, we now have a scientific paper which actually posits a quite reasonable argument for believing that the Pause is a real, physical phenomenon, and not an insignificant one in terms of current and future climate change projections and hence climate change policy. A Hiatus of the Greenhouse Effect, Song, Wang, Tang, 2016:

The rate at which the global average surface temperature is increasing has slowed down since the end of the last century. . . . . .

The atmospheric and surface greenhouse effect over the tropical monsoon-prone regions is found to contribute substantially to the global total. Furthermore, the downward tendency of cloud activity leads to a greenhouse effect hiatus after the early 1990s, prior to the warming pause. Additionally, this pause in the greenhouse effect is mostly caused by the high number of La Niña events between 1991 and 2014. A strong La Niña indicates suppressed convection in the tropical central Pacific that reduces atmospheric water vapor content and cloud volume. This significantly weakened regional greenhouse effect offsets the enhanced warming influence in other places and decelerates the rising global greenhouse effect. This work suggests that the greenhouse effect hiatus can be served as an additional factor to cause the recent global warming slowdown. . . . . .

We represent an alternative pathway of internal variability driving the warming slowdown. A La Niña-like state suppresses convection in the tropical central Pacific and concomitantly reduces cloud coverage. Consequently, a zero-trend greenhouse effect is achieved under the balance of its primary contributors (e.g. water vapor, clouds, and GHGs). Finally, the hiatus of the greenhouse effect-driven warming leads to the recent global warming slowdown, in which the atmosphere traps (emits) near constant heat from (to) the surface.

Basically, what this paper is saying is that decreasing cloud cover in the central tropical Pacific region from 1992 to 2014 has reduced the (enhanced – i.e. water vapour included) atmospheric greenhouse effect in that region, which has offset increases elsewhere in the enhanced greenhouse effect. ‘Oh, that’s just natural internal variability’, hopeful warmists might say, ‘soon to be overridden by continuously increasing anthropogenic GHGs’. Alas, no, it is actually a negative feedback caused by warming in the first place, which suggests that warming will not occur at the rapid rates predicted by climate models, meaning that climate sensitivity is at the low end of current estimates. The text strongly suggests that this negative feedback mechanism is at play, even though it is careful not to say so explicitly:

The results above indicate that the notably downward Gaa tendency over the central tropical Pacific indeed plays an important role in inducing the greenhouse effect hiatus since the 1990s. What causes this decreasing Gaa? The variation of the greenhouse effect is substantially influenced by its contributors, including water vapor, clouds, and GHGs. GHG concentrations have risen steadily during recent decades . . . . .

The total column precipitable water (TCPW) anomaly significantly increases at a rate of 0.44 cm yr−1. However, the cloud area fraction (CAF) anomaly is reduced by − 0.60% yr−1, which is consistent with the decreasing cloud activity described in previous publications. Therefore, although the greenhouse effect can be enhanced by increasing GHGs and water vapor in the atmosphere, it can be weakened by decreasing clouds. If these two actions offset each other, a hiatus of the global greenhouse effect will result.

Another study published on November 8th must be even more worrying for climate alarmists – worrying in the more mundane sense that is, as they are, obviously, constantly consumed by a more esoteric and far-reaching concern for the future of the planet. This paper suggests that the earth system is actually responding to increasing anthropogenic CO2 by absorbing it at an enhanced rate. Carbon sinks – oceans/ biosphere – have supposedly doubled their uptake of CO2 in the last 50 years. The implications are far-reaching, to say the least. Rather than the linear increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide directly related to emissions which is currently assumed, CO2 might actually increase very much more slowly as the global carbon cycle adapts to the initial rapid increase by absorbing excess carbon into sinks at an enhanced rate. Let us also not forget that the fairly modest total increase in atmospheric CO2 post-industrial revolution is tiny in comparison to the available capacity of terrestrial sinks.

However, for the period 2002–2014 there has been no significant increase in the growth rate of CO2 (Fig. 1a and Supplementary Fig. 1). The decline in the airborne fraction since the start of the twenty-first century has therefore been sufficiently large as to result in a pause in the rate of increase of the atmospheric CO2 growth rate . . . . .

The slowing of the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 between 2002 and 2014 (Fig. 1a and Supplementary Fig. 1) coincides with a period during which global temperature increases over vegetated land also slowed markedly (Fig. 3 and Supplementary Fig. 3, note recent reports suggest continued warming over oceans). Since the start of the century, global temperatures over vegetated land increased at a rate of 0.1 _C per decade, compared with a rate of 0.32 _C per decade in the previous two decades (Fig. 3). Satellite-driven estimates of the carbon cycle suggest that the slowdown in global warming led to a slowdown in temperature-driven ecosystem respiration of roughly 60% (Fig. 3). . . . .

Although a lack of temperature increases likely contributed to the slowdown in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 over the past decade (Fig. 3), results from the DGVM ensemble suggest that an increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration was the primary driver of the enhanced uptake over the past century (Fig. 4).

Thus we have another ‘Pause’ to accompany the Pause in global surface warming. Furthermore, this Pause in the rate of accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere has been precipitated by 1) the Pause in global surface temperature, and 2) the observed increase in atmospheric CO2. You might expect that this would mean we now don’t have to worry so much about the effect of emissions on climate because global temperatures have slowed in addition to the more important fact that carbon is being sucked out of the atmosphere at a faster rate as plants adapt to increasing concentrations. But the authors don’t quite see it this way:

The slowdown in global warming is expected to be temporary however and may already have ended with the strong El Nino Southern Oscillation of 2015 and 2016, with subsequent consequences for the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 (ref. 36). The likely continuation of warming in the coming decades suggests further future increases in net carbon releases.

However, as we have seen, the Pause is back (as ENSO rapidly fades), negative cloud feedbacks may limit further global warming (as they have likely already done so far in the 21st century), climate sensitivity may thus be low, and if plant life and the oceans are also gobbling up anthropogenic CO2 at an increasing rate, the prospects for further ‘dangerous’ GHG warming are looking somewhat diminished. This is all very good news, but I suspect it will not be seen as such by advocates of runaway global warming, which is a little odd, given that the world is probably not as imperiled as they had hitherto ‘sincerely’ believed.

Post navigation

36 thoughts on “The Pause Returns – Bigger, Better and with a New Partner”

The alarm side don’t like to dwell on the increasing rate of CO2 removal by sinks, because it indicates that the fabled doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations probably cannot actually be achieved by any plausible human activity. Impending saturation of terrestrial carbon sinks has often been fondly imagined in the past, but still shows no sign of riding to the rescue of the failing predictions.

The ability of the bio-geosphere to gobble up increasing amounts of CO2 means that even if severe warming started to occur, we would be able to return to a safer trajectory in a reasonably short time (by, say, rapid and huge development of nuclear power). If it is too easy to respond to approaching harm then the game is up, and global-warming alarmism will disappear like Scotch mist with a fine June sunrise on Rannoch Moor.

Hansen suggests the reason for the increased CO2 uptake by plants and oceans is the extra nutrients available because of the increase of aerosols post 2000 produced by coal burning power stations in Asia. But the increase in global sulphates post 2000 has been fairly modest, certainly in comparison to the huge increase in aerosol emissions from 1950 to the 1970s.

There was no similar decrease in the airborne fraction of CO2 from 1960-75 when global aerosols were climbing very rapidly (much more so than they did post 2000), so I don’t think Hansen’s explanation holds much water. Likewise, when aerosols were declining from 1975 to 2000, using Hansen’s reasoning, one might have expected the airborne fraction to have increased but it didn’t – in fact it was fairly constant until 1985, then declined rapidly over the next decade, thereafter staging a partial recovery.

It seems that we might be in for a cold and snowy winter on both sides of the planet. While much has been made about the warm Arctic and Canada, these are expected to cool down too. The area of Arctic ice is low, and for the same reason the volume doesn’t seem to be good either, this is because outer edges haven’t frozen. The main body looks quite good. The Russian side in particular could seriously thicken, even though it has only recently started freezing. The Candian archipelago is looking better than last year. What we normally don’t notice at this time of year is the amount of thick ice flowing out of the Fram Strait. The total area grows rapidy but the ice is ultimately doomed. This year the prevailing wind has blown into the Arctic (hence the high pole temperatures) and while the wind has delayed new ice forming it has preserved older ice.

Wind also stopped the other side of the Arctic freezing but it has deposited masses of snow on Siberia. Those outer edges will eventually freeze and may be protected by the bulwark of cold built up on the land masses round it, later into the spring/summer.

And there was more bad news for them today.
Ice around the Antarctic has hardly changed in the last century, according to ship’s logs from Shackleton, Scott etc – listen to the interview with Reading University’s Sammie Buzzard on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning.
“Some sceptics might leap on this…” said Justin Webb, who also kept saying how amazing it was that there hadn’t been much change!
[She was the one who complained to the BBC about Paxman on University Challenge!]

They don’t have a clue do they. Oh dear, the Antarctic sea ice is not conforming to climate model projections of a warming world, so we’ll just take a stab in the dark and say the region must be under the influence of overwhelming natural variability. Arctic sea-ice, on the other hand, has conformed to the same (flawed, obviously) climate models (well, since 1979 at least *cough*), so we’ll call ice melt in the Arctic ‘overwhelmingly anthropogenic’ and downplay any possibility of natural variability also having a significant influence at the North Pole.

I suspect – and I could be wrong here – it will take more than just a few ‘tweaks’ of their all-singing all-dancing climate models to reconcile the vast difference in the supposed manifestations of global warming that we have seen at either pole. 🙂

Len, no I don’t personally expect the poles to respond the same way to global climate change, simply because they are poles apart in terms of their geography and location, plus the evidence suggests that they have tended to go in opposite directions, naturally, in response to past climate forcings. This is known as the Bipolar Seesaw. But that’s not the issue. The issue is, climate models predicted Antarctic sea-ice would diminish, and it hasn’t; in fact, SH sea-ice has increased considerably since 1979, especially since about 2006.

This illustrates very nicely how the poles have gone in opposite directions since satellite monitoring of sea-ice began. Climate models failed with respect to modeling the trend in SH sea-ice, but got NH sea-ice trends about right, probably for the wrong reasons.

CN’s nürotic editor-in-chief even grits his teeth and pays you a couple of compliments, or the closest thing thereto we can expect from people who fantasize about holding war-crimes trials where we’re the guests of honor. This guy graciously praises your quick ship-deserting, rank-breaking and rat-cunning skills. Which is awful big of him.

Jaime, what is meant by models not predicting changes in Antarctica? I’ve seen that statement before and it is always past tense (logically, as it is talking about predictions). What seems more interesting is whether more recent models capture that behaviour. Models are, after all, research tools, so a previous deficiency should allow the physics of what happens to all the mass-loss melt water to be understood.

rumor has it a certain Lew has still to gurgle up its biggest nuggets of treasure yet. Next in the pipeline (or the S-bend, as the case may be; I’m not licensed to plumb the depths of such backed-up genius), you can expect a whole new bloody coup overthrowing everything you thought you knew about logic.

With his next exertion, his Last Big Push, Our Esteban—armed only with a cocktail napkin—is set to produce proof that the less the models have come true to date, the more they must come true in the imminent future.

So I wouldn’t crow too loudly about the sluggish response of the ice caps so far to what The Science Is Telling Them To Do.

Nevermore say Nevermore, Lenore, or you may just find yourself swallowing your crowing (in the form of a humble pastry) when it turns out the models—far from having no accuracy to offer—were simply constipated.

In laypersons’ terms, they’re overdue for an explosive show[er] of skilfulness. A bit like Steve’s fruitless career itself; he’s a very-late-middle-aged bloomer, that’s all. Our opponents’ incompetence is Not Our Friend.

Jaime, we like to joke about this sort of “warming in the pipeline” logic, or magical thinking.

But I once got sucked into a slanging-match with a certain Big Boring Dominic, whose immovable position (really—I’m not kidding) was that:

— we “know” climate sensitivity = such-and-such degrees Celsius,
— the climate has not warmed as expected,
— therefore we’re about to experience extra-fast warming as temperatures catch up to meet their obligations under the agreed-to ECS

That was the funniest part. The tragickest part for me, as an amateur educator, was to see someone I respected as much as BBD incorrigibly insisting that ECS was defined in relation to a specific, ‘pre-industrial’ baseline, apparently having forgotten since high school (if he ever understood in the first place) that logarithmic curves have no special starting point. At one stage I lost my famous patience and demanded to know what part of the phrase “for EVERY doubling of atmospheric CO2…” he didn’t comprehend.

Jaime, from the little that I have now read on Antarctic sea ice, it appears that to forecast, changes it is necessary to predict future local wind patterns. That seems like a tall order, so it doesn’t surprise me that models fail to capture this detail. Does it surprise you?

With both poles, it seems more important to concentrate on the average ice cover during non-winter months, as this determines the albedo and hence whether ice loss is a positive feedback. I’ve not seen such treatment of the data, have you?

First it was ‘newer climate models might predict Antarctic ice trends better’ (they don’t) now it’s ‘unsurprising’ that the climate models fail because they can’t capture the finer detail of local wind patterns. You seem to be looking for excuses to let the climate models off the hook. What you’re saying is that they have failed to model natural variability sufficiently in that they predicted a decreasing trend in sea ice, whereas sea ice has actually increased considerably since 1979. So natural variability must have completely swamped the global warming signal. But the unavoidable fact is, the models have comprehensively failed to model sea-ice trends in the Antarctic.

You are arguing ‘but what if’ they correctly modeled local wind patterns. They don’t, but if they did they might have got closer to the observed trend in SH sea-ice, but there again, by including significant natural variability, they might have grossly overestimated sea-ice loss in the NH, because the north and south poles are connected by the general circulation, in particular the Atlantic thermohaline circulation, which climate models have also failed to accurately model in the North Atlantic – again, natural variability has proved to be significantly in excess of the predicted global warming signal. Another failure of the models.

The models also failed to predict the Pause. Most of them are running ‘too hot’ compared to observed global temperatures. They have failed in that they wrongly predicted an accelerated warming in the troposphere – especially the mid troposphere above the tropics (the so called ‘hotspot’). So we have to ask, is it just because they can’t get the finer details correct, or is there something more fundamental amiss?

David Rose at the ‘hate-filled’ Mail has rubbed salt in the wounds today, pointing out the huge fall in land-only temperatures following the demise of the 2015/16 super El Nino. No doubt Bob Ward will appear from the woodwork pretty soon to chastise Rose for ‘misrepresenting’ the science.

Jaime, there is natural variability and there is forced response. The latter may contain noise that makes it look like the former, but the two are not the same. We are clearly* experiencing the latter but you seem to prefer to classify the noise as the former.

Nino, you appear to be saying that I am classifying noise as natural variability and therefore somehow ignoring the ‘forced response’ which is evidenced from the CO2 record. How very confused you appear to be.

Firstly, we have internal climate forcings and external climate forcings. If we look at the long term temperature record (not Antarctic sea ice extent), we can clearly see a secular trend – which may be due to some external forcing – overlaid by multidecadal internal variability (chiefly PDO and AMO oceanic cycles). If we examine the temperature signal more closely, we discern “noise” which consists of numerous internal and external forcings such as, e.g. solar cycles, ENSO, stratospheric sulfur aerosols or stratospheric water vapor.

In the case of sea ice at either pole, I suspect multidecadal variability plays a rather larger role in observed trends over the satellite era than climate scientists admit, especially at the north pole. In the case of warming (and lack of warming!) since 1950, I suspect multidecadal variability (and ENSO “noise”) is also more significant an influence than the IPCC AR5 attribution statement allows for. I also suspect that the post 1850 secular trend is driven by significant natural forcings (most likely solar) which the IPCC downplays in favour of ascribing the forcing more ‘logically’ to increasing atmospheric CO2.

“Jaime, it’s not really a matter of letting models off the hook. They are research tools.”

No, they are very big sticks with which “climate science” has hit us all over the head with these past few decades, claiming that it’s our fault the world has warmed and it will be our fault when it boils over. Them and the other big stick of the “high school physics” which tells us that CO2 absorbs photons and re-emits them. If they were just ‘research tools’ they would have been consigned to a cupboard in the corner of the science lab marked ‘Use with caution’ years ago.

“Their limitations are probably well known” – but not generally admitted!

“The idea that there is a pause in surface warming is hard to reconcile with surface temperature records.”

Why is it that people think because we have a record warm month or year, this necessarily implies that it is warming? ‘Records’ in the surface datasets can be set by a mere 0.01C. The Pause, or the slowdown in surface warming has allowed climate science to claim numerous ‘records’ over the past decade, despite the fact that warming has been statistically insignificant. The 2015/16 El Nino – which started building as early as 2014 has allowed them to claim a whole heap of monthly and yearly ‘records’, but in reality, all that’s happened is that global temperature has stayed at a high plateau, with “noise” occasionally nudging it higher or lower, then El Nino pushing it way above the plateau for a short time. Now we’re heading back into Pause territory, post Nino, climate scientists will find that global temperature ‘records’ are going to be rather difficult to come by.

Jaime, blaming models and physics for revealing what continued emissions might lead to makes no sense. Until someone develops something better, they are all we have.

As for the recent record temperatures being a transient, that seems well disproved by the numerous indices. That it is possible to find a subset of the earth system that appears to show something different is weak evidence against it. It is quite well known, I think, that the Arctic is currently way warmer than usual, yet the land-only data referred to by GWPF (which seems to be your source) presumably omits that region. If you were creating a temperature anomaly index, would you omit the area with the greatest anomaly?

“In the case of sea ice at either pole, I suspect multidecadal variability plays a rather larger role in observed trends over the satellite era than climate scientists admit, especially at the north pole. In the case of warming (and lack of warming!) since 1950, I suspect multidecadal variability (and ENSO “noise”) is also more significant an influence than the IPCC AR5 attribution statement allows for. I also suspect that the post 1850 secular trend is driven by significant natural forcings (most likely solar) which the IPCC downplays in favour of ascribing the forcing more ‘logically’ to increasing atmospheric CO2.”

LEN MARTINEZ“…blaming models and physics for revealing what continued emissions might lead to makes no sense. Until someone develops something better, they are all we have.”

Until the scientific age, chicken entrails were all we had for predicting the future. For over a thousand years rational people had no good grounds for saying “your chicken entrails are rubbish.” But they knew it, nonetheless.

We’re only a few decades into the computer age, and already we have quite good grounds for rejecting climate models. Have you looked hard at the famous suppressed IPCC AR6 SPM spaghetti graph? What do you see? I see chicken entrails.

LEN MARTINEZThat it is possible to find a subset of the earth system that appears to show something different is weak evidence against it. It is quite well known, I think, that the Arctic is currently way warmer than usual, yet the land-only data … presumably omits that region.

It omits the polar icecap, but not the large chunk of the Arctic which is on land, which is quite sensible, since most of us live on land, and not on ice. The brass-monkey’s-balls-breaking temperatures currently being experienced in Siberia are predicted (that’s predicted 3 months ahead, not in 2050) to deliver us a cold winter, and with coal-fired power stations closing in order to prevent us dying in heatwaves in 2050, that matters. It’s us paying the scientists and politicians and policy makers, not our putative grandchildren. Could we please lay off the temperature-reducing policies until my mum’s paid this winter’s fuel bill?

Nino, I suspect you are trying to infer (clumsily and contortedly) that I am some sort of conspiracy theorist. When I use the term ‘suspect’, what I mean is that I have looked at the evidence for and against a particular theory of what has caused A and am more inclined to conclude that, on the weight of the evidence surveyed, the commonly assumed notion that B>>C in the equation A=B+C is wrong. Very conspiratorial.

Actually, I wasn’t blaming models and physics for revealing what might happen in the future, I was blaming scientists and green activists for using those models and that high school physics to beat us all over the head with. That would be like me blaming the chicken entrails for revealing a future I didn’t like. Granted, medieval types might actually think like that and harbour a desire to go kill another chicken for better entrails. I blame the idiot using the original entrails.

“It is quite well known, I think, that the Arctic is currently way warmer than usual . . ”

Sadly, it is less well known that the Arctic was as warm, if not warmer in the 1920s to 40s as it is today.

The contention is that there is much less ice now, which is a dubious assertion, but the fact remains, a very warm Arctic has happened before, when atmospheric CO2 could not possibly have been the cause of the ‘anomalous’ warming. You might also recall that, after 1940, earth started to cool quite rapidly and didn’t warm up again until the late 70’s. But of course it’s absolutely inconceivable that this will happen today.

Geoff, I don’t know if there are good grounds for rejecting models. The scientific community seems not to think so, which implies to me that they are useful (and I don’t support ideas such as that the whole community is corrupt, grant seeking, etc, which are often used to dismiss inconvenient scientific opinion). I don’t know of the spaghetti graph you mentioned. Googling it I get various hits on graphs constructed from tree ring proxies that have nothing to do with models.

Looking at the RSS data, you are right that it extends to 82.5N, so maybe the graph presented is reasonable for land-only. All the same, Jaime say that “Sea surface temperatures are currently cooling quite rapidly” and uses that to suggest that a “pause” will occur. But the ocean-equivalent RSS source (http://data.remss.com/msu/monthly_time_series/RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TLT_Anomalies_Ocean_v03_3.txt) shows ocean temps pretty much unchanged for the last 5 months (-70.0/82.5 column), so the new “bigger-better pause” to be found alone in RSS TLT (and TLT is as good as deprecated) looks to be a fiction.

RSS global temperature anomaly up to October 2016. Obviously not as steep a drop as the land data. Anybody like to wager what will happen in the coming months and throughout 2017? Will the Pause proper return? November data should be out in the next day or so. That might give us some idea of which way the tide is turning.

Interestingly, UAH shows a slight increase in global lower troposphere temperature from Oct to Nov 2016, caused by significant warming in the southern hemisphere (tropics and NH show declines). Asked about the huge drop in land only temperatures on RSS, Roy Spencer guesses that it’s a bias created by the diurnal adjustment, but this explanation doesn’t seem to hold up too well. The small increase appears to be enough however for some people to claim that the global warming signal is re-asserting itself post El Nino. We shall see. Roy Spencer forecasts that 2016 will not be statistically significantly warmer than 1998 in his dataset.

Waitaminnit… so the nefarious plot is to task the No Astronautics or Space Agency with something having to do with the exploration of space? Why that’s… apostasy! heresy! How are the New Millerites to obtain other people’s money?